Skip to main content

First Post!

Welcome to the site!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Article Review - “Poetry and Writing: Improving Fluency and Motivation For Students With Developmental Dyslexic Traits” by Dr. Benita Bruster

 The article I chose  was “Poetry and Writing:  Improving Fluency and Motivation For Students With Developmental Dyslexic Traits” by Dr. Benita Bruster,   Professor of Education and Interim Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at Austin Peay University in  Clarksville, Tennessee.  The article was based on Dr. Bruster’s work in a fourth grade ELA classroom with a small group of students who had been selected by their classroom teachers because they were struggling readers (Bruster, 2015).  In her article, Dr. Bruster explains that she was a volunteer who was “interested in literacy” (Bruster, 2015, p.93) and was approached by the classroom teacher to work with five boys during “their regular small group reading time”  (Bruster, 2015, p.93) for a period of nine weeks).  She goes on to explain that the boys selected for the intervention were identified as demonstrating characteristics of “developmental dyslexia”  (Bruster, 2...

Early Reading Motivation article

Me and My Reading Profile: A Tool for Assessing Early Reading Motivation      (portrait of my daughter, Tess, age 7, reading her favorite series Ivy and Bean )         The article  "Me and My Reading Profile" by Marinek, Malloy, Gambrell, and Mazzoni (2015) discusses the value of assessing a young reader's motivation. It states that motivation plays as vital a role in reading achievement as other key skills (such as decoding and comprehension), yet motivation is rarely addressed in grades K-2. The authors go on to state that it is necessary to measure young students' interest in developmentally appropriate ways so that "literacy instruction can be designed with motivation in mind" (Marinak et. al. p. 52) and propose that they have created a useful tool with which to gauge students' interest in reading. Marinek et. al. (2015) state that "Without attention to reading motivation, some students may never reach their full reading potential...

My Reading Life

My Reading Life (Carolyn Acker)     I have been a reader from the time I acquired the ability and books continue to be an integral part of my life.  I read daily and if I have a day or two where I cannot find at least a few minutes to read, I begin to long for a way to escape my responsibilities.  It sounds a bit like an addiction, I admit, but I really do need to read!  Any symptoms of withdrawal, thankfully, are quickly alleviated by some time with a good book.  My home is filled with books due to my reading habit, and my three children have inherited my habit, much like my mother passed her reading habit on to me.     My mother read voraciously throughout the rearing of her nine children and continues to read at the age of 80, albeit at a slower pace.  While I don’t remember her reading to me as a small child, I have a clear picture of my mother reading a book on the beach in the summer while we swam, on th...